Russia Search Giant Yandex Helps CERN Hunt For New Particles

Russian search giant Yandex has created a custom-built search tool, for free, to help 700 CERN scientists at the Large Hadron Collider quickly search through (at present, one-twentieth of) the trove of particle data they produce—a task that would once take hours. Yandex is offering up some free server space too. Yandex has catalogued only a fraction of the collision records, but hopes to expand that to all the 20 billion particle collisions that will take place this year—a number, Business Week notes, is more than the total number of indexed pages on the Web. Data storage and sorting is an area that scientists love a bit of help with. In March, Amazon announced it would lend a pocket of space in its massive cloud to the NIH and allow genome scientists to store the 200 terabytes of date they'd collected as part of the 1000 Genomes Project.

To read news items as they develop watch for more Fast Feed stories during the day, by clicking here.